Right Thinking from the Left Coast

California Digs Pit, Throws in Money

California broke ground Tuesday on its $68 billion high-speed rail system, promising to combat global warming while whisking travelers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than three hours.

The bullet train project, the first in the nation to get underway, faces challenges from Republican cost-cutters in Congress and Central Valley farmers suing to keep the rails off their fields. Others doubt the state can deliver the sleek system as designed, and worry it will become an expensive failure.

But Gov. Jerry Brown said high-speed rail is essential to meeting his latest goal: Encouraging the nation’s most populous state to get half its power from renewable energy by 2030.

California only has a tiny fraction of the $68 billion dollars needed for the program. That’s $68 billion now. God knows what it will cost by 2030 when Jerry Brown will be 92 years old, if he’s still alive.

Ultimately, the plan is for a 520-mile line that is supposed to get people from downtown L.A. to downtown San Francisco. We’re told there’s “hope” of getting that done by 2029 and also that “The authority needs to speed up the eminent domain process, since only 100 of the 500 land parcels needed for the rails and stations have been purchased.” Which ones? Have they got all that downtown L.A. and San Francisco land yet?

My prediction is that these endpoints — without which no one would want this project — will never be reached by the line that’s getting started now in Fresno. The only question is when people will freak out sufficiently to abandon the desperate throwing of good money after bad.

Brown and his allies are touting this as jobs program. That’s odd, because the President has just issued a veto threat over the Keystone XL program and the same liberals touting the construction jobs for the California Calamity poo-poo the construction jobs for Keystone XL as temporary (in today’s economy, all jobs are temporary).

I’m also dubious that this project will be beneficial either economically or environmentally. Rail projects have a long history of being fantastic boondoggles. At a cost of $68 billion (and probably a lot more), this rail system would have to create a hell of a lot of economic activity to “pay for itself”. And the governor has already admitted that ridership will likely have to be subsidized for the train to function.

As for the environmental aspect, trains don’t run on good thoughts. They run on electricity, which is still mostly generated from fossil fuels. An empty train running between two cities would be a lot worse for global warming than no train.

You should check out Reason, which has been making the case against this boondoggle for years. Right now, I have 2019 as the year in which California will realize what a colossal mistake they’ve made. The only question is whether they’ll run a tiny little train to show they got something out of it or have another great project to fill in the giant hole they’ve just dug.

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In my experience, these projects are expected to fail. They only need (and care) to get as far as using taxpayer money to buy a lot of unusable land from well-connected people. I suspect the vast majority of property needed for this project is currently owned by various holding companies. I would be surprised if a quarter is still by regular people.